Henry James, Lecturer

Abstract

A N EARLY WRITER on Henry James as a lecturer comAmented that, literally speaking, there was no occasion for consideration of the subject inasmuch as James was not a 'lecturer,' in our popular sense, and can scarcely be made into one by placing him next a high table and inviting him to speak from nine until ten o'clock in the evening.' If one adopts such a strict interpretation of the term, then obviously Henry James was not a lecturer. Both the lectures he gave during the early months of I905 are the orally delivered essays Miss Dunbar tagged them. Nevertheless, however semi-publicly or even privately he did so, James did address more than a dozen different groups from Cambridge to Los Angeles during the latter part of his 1904-1905 stay in America. Hence, miscast as he at first may seem in the role, James was a lecturer for a few months. But, one wonders, why did James become a lecturer? And what sort of a lecturer was he? What was the audience reaction to his lectures? Since the answers to these questions are not precisely what one might expect them to be, a study of this relatively little known aspect of Henry James's career makes an illuminating excursion into James biography as well as furnishes a picture of James slightly different from the usual one. Unlike other famous writers (for instance, Thackeray and Dickens) James had not come to America in 1904 in order to lecture. H-e had, in fact, months before sailing from England, refused the invitation to lecture which he had received from the Lowell Institute, one of the oldest and most influential lecture-sponsoring institutions in the United States. At the time, James recognized the honor done him by the Institute but felt that the small amount of money offered could not compensate for the time and trouble lecturing would cost him. He had more important business-the gathering of material-in America. Once he was in this country, however, he did lecture-for more money than the Lowell Institute had been able to offer him. He had had, as a commentator put it,